Half the World in Winter

by Maggie Joel

  There was no reply and they looked at each other.

  ‘Perhaps this is not the place?’ suggested Rhoda. If it was not, Dinah had no idea where else they would go. She knocked a second time, then, on hearing no reply, pushed the door open.

  Inside was a passageway with a number of doors leading off it and a smell of boiling cabbage or rank meat or unwashed bodies or all three.

  ‘Are you sure?’ whispered Rhoda, clutching her arm, and Dinah was not sure but they had made an appointment and they would keep it.

  ‘Hello? Mrs Moore?’

  A man appeared at the far end of the passage, a short man in a patched waistcoat and a derelict hat. He stood and regarded the two ladies and pushed back his hat to scratch his head. He looked like he’d just woken up.

  ‘What d’you want?’ he demanded.

  ‘We are looking for Mrs Moore. This is number 1 Brown’s Passage Buildings, is it not?’

  The man scowled at them. ‘Who wants to know?’

  ‘Obviously, we do,’ Dinah replied.

  The man growled at them and advanced down the passageway and, beside her, Rhoda said in a quavering voice, ‘Oh dear.’

  ‘She’s not here,’ he said, stopping directly in front of them.

  ‘Then do you know of her whereabouts? Or when she might return?’

  The man seemed on the verge of laughing but stopped himself as though he knew such an action might cause himself some physical damage.

  ‘Nope,’ he said instead. ‘Might be gone a while. A long while,’ he added mysteriously.

  ‘I see. Well.’ Dinah tried to think. ‘In that case we shall reassess our situation,’ she concluded.

  They turned and beat a retreat.

  ‘What do you think he meant, she might be gone a long while?’ said Rhoda, clearly relieved to have come out of the building unscathed.

  ‘I do not know,’ Dinah admitted. She had not reckoned on the woman not keeping the appointment. The man’s words had the unfortunate effect of suggesting that Mrs Moore had undertaken a dead-of-night flit from her wretched lodgings, an angry landlord or a constable or both in hot pursuit. She may already be languishing in a police cell. She would not, Dinah decided, voice these unsettling thoughts out loud. ‘Let us wait for a short while,’ she said, ‘here on this corner to see if she comes.’

  They waited but the woman did not come. Instead a horrible misshapen figure appeared out of the gloom and they stared at it, clutching at one another in terror. As it approached them they saw that the figure was a man with a long wooden pole across his shoulders, and hanging from the pole were a dozen dead blackbirds, tied by their feet with string and swinging in unison as the man staggered towards them beneath his load.

  ‘Two for a farvin’, lovely ladies,’ he offered in a rasping voice through toothless gums, pausing before them and turning this way and that so that his dreadful load swung in a crazy dance and one of the dead birds brushed against Rhoda’s arm so that she shrieked.

  ‘No, thank you,’ said Dinah firmly, reaching blindly for her handkerchief to cover her nose.

  ‘Make you a lovely pie, they would.’

  ‘Come, Rhoda. I think it is time we left,’ and they grabbed each other’s hands and hurried away, Dinah not at all sure which was the correct direction but aware that the horrid man was shuffling after them. Beside her, Rhoda stifled a cry. There were no cabs so they hastened in a crazy zigzag south and west, popping out into St Martin’s Lane, gasping and reeling, and catching their breath. At a more ladylike pace they made for Trafalgar Square, reaching it just as the black clouds that had been gathering all morning began to squeeze out the first heavy, fat raindrops and they picked up their skirts and, along with everyone else, ran up the steps of the National Gallery to shelter.

  She had told Mrs Logan she was going to the National Gallery, thought Dinah, and now, here she was.

  ‘Oh, he was horrid!’ gasped Rhoda, pausing on the top step to catch her breath.

  ‘He was just trying to sell us his wares. I feel certain he meant us no harm,’ Dinah admonished, though her heart was racing. ‘And we are quite safe now—see, we are at the National Gallery! What safer place could there be in all of London?’

  During their headlong flight they had not spoken of their abortive enterprise but now Rhoda exclaimed, and there was a heartbreaking catch in her voice, ‘Oh I knew it would all be for nothing!’ and she was evidently close to tears but as the rain was falling onto every face, no one noticed.

  ‘But it was worth trying,’ Dinah insisted, putting an arm around her cousin and leading her through the entranceway. They paused to shake the raindrops off their cloaks then drifted into the first gallery, making for the bench in the centre of the room before someone else claimed it.

  ‘But if the woman was waylaid? Delayed somewhere? If she is awaiting us even now? Perhaps we should have waited a while longer.’

  ‘It is gone twelve, Rhoda. She cannot expect us to have waited any longer. I am afraid this does rather suggest the woman was a fraud.’

  Rhoda nodded slowly but said nothing and Dinah squeezed her cousin’s hand. They sat quietly on the bench whilst around them the room filled up with fellow refugees from the storm and Dinah noticed how the raindrops that slid down her own face and onto her lips were warm and salty and not like raindrops at all.

  The rain was now so heavy that people were running in all directions in order to escape it. Horses ploughed through the rapidly growing puddles sending sheets of water over hapless pedestrians, the coach drivers hunched on their seats with their collars turned up and hats pulled low, the water cascading from the brims. In Trafalgar Square those who did not live nearby or could not hail a cab made for the shelter of the gallery, congregating in a sodden mass and clogging up the entranceway: young ladies and gentlemen in couples and singly, flower sellers and piemen, visiting American tourists holding their sodden Baedekers over their heads as they ran, the sick and the homeless, an old soldier minus a leg who had somehow made it up the steps and was now setting up his begging tin in the doorway.

  Into this morass Thomas Brinklow easily slipped, weaving his way between the soaked people of London, a hand held to his chest, a knife clasped in his hand.

  He had followed the young lady’s cab which had made its way slowly, ensnared in the never-ending traffic. She had stopped once, to pick up another young lady, then seemed to double back, heading east. Here the cab had turned into a maze of tiny passages and he had finally lost her, and had for a time wandered aimlessly, buffeted by the swarming, hurrying, angry people who dwelt there. Finally, when it seemed that the endless maze of passageways must cover the whole of London and there was nothing else to the city but this horror, he had found his way out of the warren and onto a wide shopping street.

  Standing and squinting in the sudden daylight he had not known which way to strike but there she was before him, Mr Jarmyn’s daughter, and the other lady, her friend, walking straight towards him. Two angels. Or one angel and her attendant. A vision. Had he created this vision or had God?

  Or had the Devil?

  For a moment he had frozen. If he had moved they would have noticed him. He had stood quite still, almost leaning his shoulders on the window of the shop behind him, and they had passed right by, less than two yards from him. He had heard the swish of their gowns, the clip of their heels on the pavement, a faint scent of roses, lavender, camphor—he had not known what it was—in their wake.

  Ahead of him the two young ladies had suddenly veered to the right as though the rain had caused them to change direction and for an instant it had seemed they had seen him, but they had continued on down the street in the direction of the great column on which Admiral Lord Nelson was perched and above which the storm clouds had gathered. The rain came steadily down and they had run up the steps of the gallery and a moment later Thomas had followed them.

  The gallery attendant saw him and would have stopped him but Thomas dodged him, pausing only once he r
eached the hallway, where a second attendant hurried forward with mop and bucket. Looking down Thomas saw that a puddle had formed at his feet. But similar puddles had formed at the feet of each person taking refuge from the rain and the attendant was not singling him out. He turned left and found himself in a gallery. The room was vast and as high-ceiled as a church. Paintings, many of them religious, hung at intervals along the walls: Christ on the cross, the Last Supper, Lazarus arising from the dead, the tax collectors in the temple. How did he know all this? It had been years since he had attended the Sunday school but it had stuck in his head.

  An eye for an eye.

  He did not want it in his head. He did not want anything inside his head.

  The two young ladies were not here. He turned and returned to the hallway, crossing it and going into the first room on that side.

  And here they were, as though awaiting him. As though he had made an appointment with them, here in this very room.

  And so the enterprise had come to an inglorious conclusion, thought Dinah, and what had been achieved? Here they were, she and Rhoda, sheltering from a rainstorm in the National Gallery. It was hardly a scheme to rival Miss Nightingale journeying to the Crimea with her team of plucky nurses. Yet they had attempted something and that was the important thing, though it was becoming disappointingly apparent that she, as the eldest—the only—daughter and granddaughter of men who had built railways and made fortunes and changed destinies could no more alter the course of events in her own life than could a tiny ant scaling a blade of grass in the garden. How small we all are, she thought, how utterly insignificant; a hundred years from now there will be nothing left of us; it will be as though we never existed.

  If she had married Roger that too would have made no difference. He would still have gone off to war. He would still have died.

  Rhoda seemed to have got over both her alarm at the advances of the horrid bird seller and her disappointment at the spiritualist woman’s non-appearance and was now focussing her attention on the growing mass of people, mostly of the lower classes, who were pouring into their hall of the gallery.

  ‘Such a very large number of people,’ Rhoda observed, ‘and of all types, Dinah. You can take my word for it they would none of them be here were it not for the rain!’

  ‘We would not be here were it not for the rain,’ Dinah pointed out.

  ‘Ah, but there is every chance we would visit the gallery at some point, would we not, regardless of the rain?’

  ‘Yes, every chance.’

  ‘Whereas these people,’ Rhoda made a movement of her hand to indicate the rabble pouring in through the door, ‘would never come here otherwise. It is an unfortunate consequence of the gallery’s free-entry policy.’

  ‘No doubt,’ agreed her cousin. ‘Though perhaps a fortunate consequence of the free-entry policy is the potential for the lower classes to educate themselves.’

  ‘Oh that,’ replied Rhoda, dismissively. ‘Yes, that is of course a possibility. Though a slim one.’

  ‘An unlikely one.’

  ‘An almost inconceivable one.’

  ‘Though a possibility, none the less.’

  Dinah smiled and took her cousin’s arm, uncertain whether Rhoda was in earnest or in jest, but preferring to think the latter. At least she had got over her disappointment. And at least I have broken her out of the house, Dinah thought. How stupid mourning was! She was glad she had helped her cousin.

  Perhaps I shall tell her, she decided, about Roger. One day.

  A young man had come into the hall, or rather he had stopped in the doorway and was regarding them. He was a wretched-looking fellow, in a thin collarless shirt and no jacket though it was freezing outside, working-men’s trousers soaked to the knee, and a cap and boots to match. His face was bruised and cut, adding to his disreputable appearance. He carried something in a bundle, wrapped in a cloth and held close to this chest, or perhaps he had hurt his hand for it was wrapped up and out of sight covered by the cloth.

  ‘That man is hurt,’ she said to Rhoda. ‘Look how he holds his hand, like it is injured.’

  ‘Do not look,’ Rhoda hissed, staring fiercely at the opposite wall rather than at the man.

  But Dinah, to her cousin’s evident dismay, immediately got up and went over to the man.

  ‘Are you hurt?’ she asked, pointing to his arm, and his eyes widened and they were black, an unfathomable black, and Dinah took a step back.

  Thomas could not move. His body, his arm had frozen. His heart was thudding painfully in his chest so that he struggled to breathe. He could no longer feel the handle of the knife that was clasped in his right hand. Perhaps he had dropped it? He could not look down to see if he had dropped the knife.

  The young lady was standing before him, looking into his face quizzically, confused by his expression, perhaps also a little frightened. He wanted to reassure her, he wanted her to know that he would do her no harm.

  But he was here to do her harm! That was his purpose! An eye for an eye. One girl for another girl. Justice served. And it did not matter that this was a public place, a gallery full of important people and important paintings. It did not matter if a dozen, a hundred people witnessed his actions for there was nothing beyond that point, he had no thought for what might happen to himself. The Thomas Brinklow who had boarded a train in Dawley to attend a fair with his daughter no longer existed. He had died that day.

  ‘Your hand, I wondered if you had hurt your hand?’ said the young lady again, offering a tentative smile, and Thomas Brinklow, the man who thought he had died along with his little girl in the train crash, found that he had turned and fled from the room, from the young lady, from justice and, as he ran, the knife dropped from his hand.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  MRS LOGAN REALISED IT WAS time for her to go.

  She had not slept at all that night and now she sat by the window in the little armchair in her room, the curtains opened before her, and watched the moon sink lower in the western sky. It would be dawn in an hour. She would be long gone by then. She would leave, but not because Mrs Jarmyn had accused her of stealing or because Dinah had threatened to report her. She would leave because she could not be in the same house with Mr Jarmyn when he was married to another woman. He would see that, he would understand her actions. He would know what her departure meant.

  She remembered another pre-dawn morning three years ago, herself seated on the bed, Paul, her husband, standing beside the shuttered window in their two-room tenement, holding aloft a tiny tumbler of some liquor—port, most likely, he had a taste for port. (Even now she shuddered at the smell when decanting a bottle.) The room was in shadows, lit only by the guttering candle, its meagre light catching the dark liquid in his tumbler and creating a myriad of crimson, flickering points. She had concentrated on those flickering points as they had seemed, almost, to transcend the mundane scene of his departure that far-off morning, of that horrid room, of their life together. If she concentrated on them she did not have to see him. They had not been blessed with children and this failure had been merely the most tangible manifestation of their brief and unproductive marriage. It was a failure neither had spoken of—she out of a growing realisation that she did not want a child with this man, he out of an inability to remain sober. She had rarely seen him during those three years without a glass in his hand.

  When the railway accident happened she had received news of it within the hour. She had not believed, at first, that he had been killed in the crash. Had not dared to hope. Then her guilt had made her rush to the accident site to find him. She had convinced herself she was no different to the other frantic wives searching desperately for their menfolk. She had almost believed it. When she had seen his corpse laid out in a line with so many others, white and still, hardly marked at all, she had wept but her tears had been of relief.

  And then Mr Jarmyn had appeared out of the smoke.

  Why had he been reading the Wombourne report yesterday?
Did he feel responsible for her husband’s death? She had never thought of it that way before, but perhaps he did. Was that why he had come and sought her out after the inquest? It was an act of charity, she had always known that, yet she had thought at the time there was something more, some other reason that could not be voiced, and now would never be voiced. But now she wondered if she was mistaken, if it was simply that he felt responsible for Paul’s death?

  She stood up and walked restlessly about her room. She did not wish guilt to be the reason for Lucas’s arrival at her door, for his extraordinary offer of employment. Yet, if it was guilt, why had he not sought out all the widows and offered them all positions in his household?

  She stopped dead. Perhaps he had. Perhaps he had gone to half a dozen other houses and spoken to half a dozen other women, offering them all the position of housekeeper, and all had turned him down. Perhaps she had been last on the list. The only one desperate enough, foolish enough, to accept his offer.

  For a moment she forgot to breathe. How could she not have realised this before now?

  Well, then it was equally important that she pack her things and move on. She had outstayed her welcome.

  Outside her window the moon was obscured by a bank of clouds. She steadied herself and in the dark began to pack her clothes into a portmanteau and a small trunk. By the time the clouds had drifted on and the moon had reappeared she had packed everything. She made the bed. Hermione would have to strip it next laundry day. Poor Hermione. She would have her work cut out for her. How quickly would they find a replacement? Would they get another housekeeper, or would Mrs Jarmyn insist on a second maid instead?

  She realised it did not matter. It no longer concerned her.

  She opened her door and listened. The house was silent. She waited. Somehow if she stood here, in the doorway, she was still a part of the household. Once she picked up her trunk and her portmanteau it was over.

  A cat whined loudly in the street outside. She wondered if it was Mr Gladstone. He was loud enough to wake the dead and that she did not want. She picked up the two items of luggage, awkwardly managing both at once, not wanting to risk two trips. She made her way down the first flight of stairs to where the family’s rooms were, then down again, finally reaching the ground floor. She had written a brief letter of resignation and she placed this now on the silver tray in the hallway.